Principal Security Infrastructure Engineer

Principal Security Infrastructure Engineer

At Vast, our mission is to contribute to a future where billions of people are living and thriving in space. We are building artificial gravity space stations, allowing long-term stays in space without the adverse effects of zero-gravity. Our initial crewed space habitat will be Haven-1, scheduled to be the world's first commercial space station when it launches into low earth orbit in May 2026. Our team is all-in, committed to executing our mission safely and on time. If you want to work with the most talented people on Earth furthering space exploration for humanity, come join us.

As a Principal Security Infrastructure Engineer, you will have the opportunity to build a modern IT infrastructure from the ground up. We build our systems cloud-first, with an emphasis on researching and deploying the latest technologies and paradigms. You will identify opportunities to improve and expand our IT infrastructure to enhance speed, security, and ease of use. You will have the opportunity to plan, build, test, deliver, and maintain projects from start to finish. Likewise, you will prioritize establishing our IT function to be an ally to enhance employee productivity while balancing security.

This will be a full-time, exempt position located in our Long Beach location.

Responsibilities :

• Architect and secure Kubernetes clusters on bare metal and cloud environments, emphasizing isolation, encryption, and policy enforcement.
• Develop and manage secure provisioning for bare metal systems, including DHCP, DNS, PXE / iPXE / HTTPBoot, and Linux, with an emphasis on measured boot, secure boot, and hardware trust.
• Build and maintain security tooling and automation (Go, Python, Bash) for provisioning, monitoring, and continuous security validation across environments.
• Collaborate with data center operations, hardware, and networking teams to enforce physical security, network segmentation, and zero-trust principles.
• Manage infrastructure configuration using GitOps (Git, Flux, Terraform) with security scanning and policy-as-code controls.
• Establish monitoring and alerting pipelines to detect, investigate, and respond to security events in infrastructure and cloud systems.
• Maintain and improve system documentation, runbooks, and security procedures for consistent, auditable, and repeatable infrastructure operations.
• Conduct threat modeling and risk assessments on infrastructure components, driving remediation to reduce the attack surface.
• Support incident response activities, including containment, analysis, and post-incident improvements to infrastructure security.

Minimum Qualifications :

Preferred Skills & Experience :

Pay Range :